The Presidential Campaign

October 26, 2000

https://www.smartertimes.com/224/the-presidential-campaign

The New York Times' coverage of the presidential campaign gets pretty erratic today.

A "political notebook" item that runs in the national section of today's Times refers to staged "camera-friendly encounters" between Al Gore and "real people." "Thus far, the gimmick has worked precisely as intended," the Times article reports, after mentioning that one of the staged encounters involved Mr. Gore walking to school with Bobbie and Mollie Goza. "A picture of Mr. Gore with the Gozas appeared today in the New York Times." Is the Times admitting it fell for a Gore campaign gimmick?

Another dispatch about the presidential campaign reports on an appearance in Florida that George W. Bush made with Senator McCain. Mr. McCain, the Times reports, "even went so far as to bring the recent bombing of a Navy ship in Yemen, which killed 17 Americans, into the political fray." Talk about injecting opinion into a news story. That sentence would have been better if it just said, "Mr. McCain said that Mr. Bush would better manage the security of American troops in dangerous places like Yemen." Instead, the article nudges readers with the words "even went so far as," as if to say to readers, "gosh, can you believe Mr. McCain said this?" In fact, it's perfectly reasonable for the Clinton administration's decision to coddle the tyranny in Yemen to become a campaign issue -- the decision has cost the lives of 17 sailors.

A piece in the Times about a new Bush campaign commercial misses one of the central symbols of the ad. The piece reports that as part of the ad "Boy Scouts raise a flag." But it misses the resonance of the Boy Scouts as a symbol for voters concerned about gay rights and other cultural issues -- a point that the ad's creators surely had in mind.

Finally, an editorial in today's Times criticizes Ralph Nader's third-party campaign, saying that "The country deserves a clear up-or-down vote" between the two major party candidates. "We would regard Mr. Nader's willful prankishness as a disservice to the electorate no matter whose campaign he was hurting," the Times claims in the editorial. Oh, come on. Smartertimes.com didn't go back and scour the record trying to find Times editorials calling on Ross Perot to drop out of the 1992 and 1996 elections. But we sure don't remember any such editorials. Maybe that's why the Times is writing, "we would regard" rather than "we have regarded."

Hillary and Hamas: A front-page dispatch in today's Times about ties between Hillary Clinton and supporters of Arab terrorists contains a couple of whoppers. First is a reference to a Muslim leader referring to "a United Nations resolution that he said gave the Palestinians the right to resist oppression by all means." The Times handles this with a parenthetical aside saying that the Muslim leader "said the resolution was passed in the 1980's, but was unable to provide other details." This is just plain lazy. Why is the Times relying on some Muslim leader for background on U.N. resolutions? Why doesn't it check with the American State Department or with the U.N. or with the government of Israel, which would inform the Times that there is no such U.N. resolution authorizing Palestinian Arab armed resistance. It is entirely imaginary, and the Times should say so, rather than quoting the Muslim referring to the nonexistent resolution while coyly, parenthetically casting doubt on the resolution's existence.

The same article claims that counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson "became well known when he initially strongly suggested that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of Arab terrorists." This is not true. Mr. Emerson made that suggestion about the Oklahoma City bombing in a television interview. If he wasn't well known before making the statement, why was he being interviewed on television? If Mr. Emerson wasn't already well known, why was anyone paying any attention to what he thought about the Oklahoma City bombing?

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